Posts Made By: Daren Howard

Very nice, can you give me the link where you got the plans?
Thanks, Daren

For the best recommendations you should also include what type/size scope this will be used with. Sounds likely this will be a Refractor or a Cat. Clarify this and you will get the best recommendations for your scope. Also, budget constraints may not be a bad thing to include also.

I haven't read through all the responces, and so this may have been mentioned all ready.

Perhaps, in addition to having the students take a few digital pics of the moon, maybe a couple of the fine astrophotographers here could send you some raw images with instructions on what is done to process them to the final image, and a copy of the final image, that you could use and make available to the students in a class designed to show what goes into processing the images after they are captured to get the fine finished images.

A lab like this could be done on days when the weather does not cooperate for actual under the stars study. This combined with perhaps bringing in an amateur from a local club to show the raw images being captured and the equipment used to capture the images, in the end would be a very good introduction to astrophotography and would not require the large investment that would be required to do images directly.

Add to this a couple 35 MM cameras, a class where the students build a couple barn door trackers, and then some short, barn door guided shots could make for a very good astrophoto experience for the students.

Finally, if you wish, you could add a couple star trails images taken side by side with a barn door tracker tracked image of the same field to demonstrate the earths rotation and finish off the class.

Daren

I would start by reading a few articles on the web on telescope making. There are many of these available. These will give you some idea of what people have done to create nice telescopes giving you the information you need to upgrade this one. Here is a link to a page with a decent home made spider: http://www.tulsawalk.com/projects/telescope/secondaryholder.html
And a link to another: http://www.rfroyce.com/spidrunq.htm
and a link that will bring you a ton of information: http://jhpw.phys.ntu.edu.tw/html/atm.html
and one more: http://home.wanadoo.nl/jhm.vangastel/Astronomy/links.htm

This should give you plenty of ideas to help with this scope and to do so with the least output of money.

Daren

I would get it if I could afford it with out too many issues right now. Why?

You never have to worry about who is going to show up at the public site. Cops shining flashlights to see what you are doing, other undesirable people, etc...

You will be able to build the site out as you see fit in the future. Perhaps an observatory, house, place a cheap camper on the site, etc...

You likely will get a great deal right now due to the economy.

The housing bust is likely to greatly reduce the numbers of people who will be building new developments out in the country. This makes it less likely that somebody will build near you.

And, lastly, because you can....

Reading through this thread I am amazed at how many people have said 'No, the ethos would not be better' but none of them that have said that had compared Ethos to Ortho's while at the same time those who had Ethos and Ortho's both said that they preffered the Ethos.

So, who are we going to believe here?

The people who have never used an Ethos and done a comparison or the people who own both and say the Ethos does provide a better view?

I have an Explore Scientific 14mm 100 degree that, when Barlowed with my 2x GSO barlow, delivers better images than my UO 7mm Ortho. Using the same eyepiece and just the front element of the barlow screwed directly to the eyepeice gives me about 10mm focal length and it seems to just about match a Zeiss 10mm Ortho on axis and perform better across the same field of view as the 10mm orth shows (not to mention all the extra field).

As the Ethos is very slightly better than the ES (head to head testing) I would be very surprised if it does not perform better than just about any ortho in head to head testing.